Third Annual Emerita Chancellor & Dean Mary Kay Kane Excellence Awards
Emerita Chancellor & Dean Mary Kay Kane
[UC Law San Francisco Provost and Academic Dean Morris Ratner sent the following message to the law school community on October 10, 2025.]
Dear UC Law SF Community,
As part of her estate, Emerita Chancellor & Dean Mary Kay Kane endowed a fund to support faculty. Using the annual payout from that fund, the College created three awards to honor Dean Kane’s legacy of service, scholarly, and teaching excellence at UC Law by recognizing faculty who have excelled in those areas. On November 6, 2025, from 12:30–1:30 p.m. in the ARC, we will celebrate the winners of the third annual Kane Excellence Awards, identified below and in the attached flyer. (Lunch will be served, so please RSVP so that we order the right amount of food!) Please join us for the celebration and join me in congratulating this year’s winners!
Service Excellence
Jeff Lefstin, Professor of Law. When he served as Associate Academic Dean (a role that we now call “Dean of Students”) from 2016 to 2019, Professor Lefstin significantly contributed to the College’s redesign of its academic program, including changes to the Academic Regulations and our pedagogical norms that have benefitted students and helped to produce a sustained 30+ percentage point increase in first-time bar pass rates since 2016. In the years since, Professor Lefstin has played leading roles on the faculty, including chairing the Academic Standards Committee on a regular basis and, in that capacity, navigating complex updates of our Academic Regulations. He has also generously mentored and advised new student affairs officers we have onboarded over the years and advised the administration on student affairs matters. Professor Lefstin also serves as Advisor for the Intellectual Property Concentration and co-directs the highly regarded Bucerius / UC Law SF Summer Program in Licensing Transactions in IP, an intensive, three-week, English-taught program for upper division students and junior practitioners. His contributions to the College are often behind the scenes, making it particularly fitting that he be honored with an award in Emerita Chancellor & Dean Mary Kay Kane’s name, given that much of what she did to improve the College during her tenure was similarly under the radar.
Scholarly Excellence and Contributions to Intellectual Life
Teaching Excellence (Full-Time Faculty)
Laurie Zimet, Director of Academic Support and Professor of Practice. Professor Zimet helped define the field of professionalized academic skills instruction and support in the legal academy. In a 2024 article posted on the UC Law SF website marking the 40th anniversary of Professor Zimet’s tenure at UC Law SF, we wrote: “Known nationally as a ‘founding mother’ of law school academic support, she helped pioneer a new field of legal education and won numerous accolades along the way. But it wasn’t fame or notoriety that propelled her to do this work. Rather, it was a deep-seated commitment to equity and the idea that every law student should get a fair shake at unlocking their potential.” One of the ways Professor Zimet has operationalized that value system is by helping to pioneer the use of “active learning” techniques in law school classrooms, a toolkit and pedagogical skill set Professor Zimet has generously shared with many colleagues on the faculty over the years. As Professor Zimet often says when training new faculty members, “The more I talk, the less students learn. The more they talk, the better they learn.” That philosophy has sparked a revolution of creativity in our classrooms at UC Law SF. It is thus fitting that we have the opportunity this year to recognize Professor Zimet’s many accomplishments over the past four decades at UC Law SF and in legal education more generally.
Teaching Excellence (Part-Time Faculty)
Rachel Proffitt, Adjunct Professor. Professor Proffitt has taught Venture Capital & Startups at UC Law since 2012. In connection with that, she was an integral part of UC Law SF’s effort to offer an expansive curriculum that gave law students the opportunity to learn from lawyers at the cutting edge of practice. Professor Proffitt’s course is one of the reasons why National Jurist prelaw Magazine regularly rates UC Law SF’s business education programming with the highest rating of A+, as it did this past year. As one student wrote in a prior end-of-semester course evaluation: “Professor Proffitt brings vast industry experience to the class. She knows how things work in the real world, which really prepares us for [working with] venture capital firms.” As another student wrote: “she’s an incredible professor.” What makes Professor Proffitt’s dedication to teaching even more remarkable is that she has continued to teach at UC Law SF since she became the CEO of Cooley, one of the country’s top law firms. Professor Proffitt reminds us that the teaching and public service elements of UC Law SF’s mission are intertwined: teaching is a form of public service.
This year’s selection committee included Chancellor & Dean David Faigman, Provost & Academic Dean Morris Ratner, Associate Dean for Research Dave Owen, Faculty Executive Committee Chair Emily Murphy, and two additional award winners from last year, Distinguished Professor of Law Reuel Schiller and Clinical Professor Brittany Glidden. I know I speak on behalf of the entire selection committee when I say that our extraordinary cohort of third annual Kane Award winners reflect the best of the qualities, skills, and commitments that Dean Kane made central features of her own professional life as a leader, intellectual giant, and teacher.
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All the best,
Provost & Academic Dean
Professor of Law
UC Law San Francisco